


God Give Us Love in the Time That We Have

by modernnature



Series: Jewish Gothic [2]
Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:29:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26996716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/modernnature/pseuds/modernnature
Summary: And he knows that he loves Eugene more than he’ll ever love anything again for the rest of his life, but he’s a SNAFU with a bag that rattles with teeth and he can never ask Eugene to sacrifice everything for him.So he gets off that train alone, and he hates himself for being a coward as he fades into the crowd of a dozen other boys so similar that the shadows couldn’t even find him.Merriell struggles when he comes back from the war.
Relationships: Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Series: Jewish Gothic [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1970143
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	God Give Us Love in the Time That We Have

The first time Snafu sees snow is in Peking. He’s been raised on Louisiana heat, all thick and solid as a blanket. Then he’d adjusted to the tropical baking sun of Pavuvu, the unrelenting fire of Peleliu, and finally the gasping, humid fog of Okinawa. He’s never been cold before, not truly, and the wintery air of Peking drives he and Eugene into each other’s arms and beds. Without the constant torment of the war, they fall together like magnets. 

There are moments in Peking when Snafu truly believes that he and Eugene could go home and still be something to each other. They rent seedy hotel rooms in stuttering Chinese and after they exhaust each other with mouths and hands and searing, impossible closeness, they talk about what it’ll be like to go to America again after so long. They talk about California, or maybe Louisiana if they’re careful. Not Alabama, but Eugene doesn’t seem too broken up about it. 

They share things about themselves that have never come up in war. Eugene confesses in a whisper that he wants to go to college and study science because he’s so damn smart it takes Snafu’s breath away. Gene’s parents want him to study medicine, and he’s not sure he has the stomach for blood and death and broken men anymore, but he’s not sure he was the stomach to disappoint them either. Snafu doesn’t have any plans, but he thinks he might like to work with his hands so he has something to show for his work at the end of the day. He likes the thought of pouring himself into something that’ll last a long time. 

Snafu admits that he can’t remember what his daddy looked like. He remembers dark skin and night-sky eyes, but he can’t remember the shape of his nose or the curve of his smile. Snafu tells Eugene about how his daddy died in a robbery when his baby sister was only two and how he left school after that to take care of his mama and sisters.

He doesn’t tell Eugene about them. Not yet.

They whisper about love in those moments bought by the hour. They never talk about the things they’ll be giving up.

The train pulls into the station in New Orleans, and Snafu can see innocence in Eugene’s face as he sleeps so soundly against the cool glass of the window. Snafu knows that the Sledges love Eugene more than anything and that Eugene loves his people too. And he knows that he loves Eugene more than he’ll ever love anything again for the rest of his life, but he’s a SNAFU with a bag that rattles with teeth and he can never ask Eugene to sacrifice everything for him. 

So he gets off that train alone, and he hates himself for being a coward as he fades into the crowd of a dozen other boys so similar that the shadows couldn’t even find him. 

\----------------------------

It’s been three weeks since Snafu turned his back on the train and Eugene and so many other things he’s desperate not to think about. It’s been three weeks of smoking and drinking liquor so cheap his throat feels raw and scratched. 

The place Snafu is renting is at the top left of a big old house that’s been dissected into four cramped apartments. The building is past her prime, nothing more than ancient slats of worn wood stacked on top of one another with a groaning, sagging porch stretching along the top floor that’s been hastily divided into two. To reach his place, Snafu has to walk down an alley to the back of the lot where there’s a run-down old staircase that turns slick as mud when it rains. 

Even before Snafu had putrefied the air with cigarettes and vomit, the apartment had the smell he reckons a crypt has, dank and dusty no matter how many hours he leaves the windows open for. It’s like dry rot had been built into the very shell of the place. It doesn’t much matter to him anyhow. 

The apartment is mostly unfurnished but for a tattered old couch that sits in the middle of the one room that isn’t a kitchen or a bathroom. It has the feel of a too-old cat, all bones and no more meat left on it. It’s where he sleeps, too far gone to care that he doesn’t have a single blanket or pillow to call his own.

It’s been three miserable weeks. Snafu wakes as he does every morning - before dawn with an ache in his head that feels like a hundred thousand nails trying to push their way up and out through his skull. He brushes the taste of stale puke out of his mouth and puts on the shirt that’s closest to clean. He doesn’t bother to lock his apartment on his way out. If someone wants his dirty sea bag and his uniform they are welcome to it as far as he’s concerned. Let them try a week at being Snafu Shelton and see how they fare.

He walks the few miles to his job at the lumberyard where they let him operate machinery more simple than a mortar but probably more complicated than is safe in his current mind set. When work lets out, he drags himself back in the direction of home. He thinks about stopping in a few bars as he passes them, but he doesn’t get paid until Friday so there’s nothing in his pockets but bad luck. 

He passes a few touristy Voodoo shops on his way and snorts through his nose. He’d contemplated stopping in one of them when he first got home. He wanted to ask a priestess if she could chase the war from his head, but her magic’s as real as the Easter Bunny and if anyone knows that the Easter Bunny’s full of shit, it’s Snafu. At this point he’s certain the war will stay in his head until he drinks himself to death.

He’s a few blocks from home when the skies open up like a Japanese machine gun and rain bullets down onto his skin leaving him chilled and drenched.

“FUCK!” The word bursts out of him and slams into the passers-by earning him looks of pity and alarm. He tilts his neck back and pants up into the rain. He trudges back to his shitty apartment, soaked to the skin like Okinawa, and climbs the slippery stairs that feel too much like mud. As always, he has to ram his shoulder into the door to get it to open, and he stumbles through the doorway and furrows his brow.

The place is all lit up, for starters. There’s a couple of candles that he knows he doesn’t own set up on the floor and they flicker warmly to welcome him home. And there’s someone in his kitchen cooking something that makes his mouth water and his stomach ache, but they weren’t invited so he pulls out his KABAR and creeps over to the doorway. He hasn’t gotten halfway across the room before his mama’s walking out into the living room looking stern and worried like she’s looked at him a million times before. 

Miryam Bordelon is an imposing figure. Though not a tall woman, she moves with the grace of a woman who knows exactly what her life is about. She commands whatever room she’s in without ever opening her mouth. She’s got Snafu’s dark curls, his wide eyes. She’s round at all her edges, making her seem soft despite the sharpness of her gaze. Her right hand is darkened with ink, a wide-open eye staring from its back. Everything about her is as familiar to Snafu as his own mind. He knows the half-dozen scars that litter her arms from burns when she got too distracted cooking. He knows the tiny, perfect curls that sit at the nape of her neck when she pulls her hair up away from her face. He knows how her hugs feel, the pressure of her kisses on his forehead, the way she’d tuck his left side in at night, then his right with just enough wiggle room for him to get one foot free from the blankets when he got too warm.

He loves the sight of her like he loves nothing else. He wishes she wasn’t there. 

“What the hell, Mama? Why you here?” Snafu’s voice is hoarse from disuse and a million cigarettes, and his mother’s face is a stormcloud that darkens the room.

“Three weeks you been home and you don’t even send me a note?” Miryam’s glare is furious as she throws a towel at him and proceeds to glare as he rubs the rainwater off his skin. He sees more hurt than anger in her, and the guilt swells up his throat and forces his head down.

“Just tell me what you want so both of us can get on with our nights.” The sight of her makes anger flood hot into his stomach. She’s come here as though she has any right to him anymore, as if he’s the same boy that left for war. His mother looks hurt and surprised. 

“Merriell, I ain’t seen you since you went off to boot camp. I’ve been waiting for you to come home for nigh on five years. You barely wrote, you didn’t tell me you were comin’ home, I wasn’t even sure you were still alive. And you want to ask me what I want? I missed my boy.” Miryam takes a step toward him and he takes a step back without thinking. 

“I ain’t that boy anymore. He’s dead and gone, and he’s not comin’ back. You can’t fix me. You should go.” He turns away from his mother, looking out the cracked, dirty window.

“You ain’t well, cher, I know it. I’ve known it since you enlisted in this war, that you’d come home different. I saw it and I was told it.” He glances back at her and she points him over to the couch. He walks on heavy feet to let himself fall into it. He feels like there’s a dozen stones in his shoes that make it impossible to lift his feet.

“I know I’m sick. I know I’ve done fucked up things. So how was I supposed to come home like I am?” His voice is snappish and angry in a way he’s never used on his mother before, but he can’t seem to control it. With a sigh, his mama walks over and wraps her arms around him, pulling him in close. He sits perfectly still for a long moment, but when she doesn’t let up he sinks into the embrace, pressing his face into her soft stomach and letting himself grieve the life he thought he’d have for the first time since he’s been home. He’s known he’s broken for a long time, and he knows he’s never going to have the life he planned for when he was young.

“You ALWAYS come home, bubeleh.” She pulls away and strokes her fingers over his cheeks, catching his tears with her thumbs. Those hands, callused and thin and marked with swirls of ink surrounding one dark eye, have nursed all his hurts from the moment he was born, but he’s not sure they can help him this time. There are limits even to her magic.

“You come home broken, you come home sick, you come home dark. My door will never be closed to you. C’est tout.” He weeps into her hands and only once he’s stopped does she push his dark curls off of his forehead to place a kiss there. She wipes her own eyes with the back of her tattooed hand and straightens up. 

“You didn’t have a lick of food in this place, Merriell,” she says disapprovingly but not unkindly, moving back toward the kitchen. “So I went and got what I needed to make my red beans and rice, so come on through. You’re skinny as a rail.” 

For the first time since he shipped out, Shelton eats his fill. He’s sure his mama uses her magic to make her food, because he’s never had anything so good as what she makes. They’re old recipes back from when his Jewish and black ancestors first mixed, so there’s been a lot of time for the women of his family to make them better with each generation.

He lets her convince him to come home. When he first got off the train those weeks ago, he didn’t think he’d go back to the bayou but now he finds he misses it like a limb. 

“This bayou’s a part of you, boy,” his daddy used to tell him when they’d go fishing. In the early mornings Shelton felt like they were the only living things in the world, ancient and powerful. “The magic that’s in your mama and the girls runs in you too.” Maybe that’s why there’s an itch in him that isn’t scratched until he’s tying their old pirogue to the dock and walking up the stairs to the place where he and every Bordelon’s been born for hundreds of years. 

For the first time in over four years he hugs his little sisters, and there’s a painful twinge in his chest when he sees how much they’ve grown and how much he’s missed. He left Agnes 13 years old and a bigger pest than any mosquito, and now she’s damn near grown and confident in her own skin. Simone was seven when he left for boot camp, hardly more than a baby, and she’s shy around him now from how unfamiliar he is. But after dinner, while Mama and Agnes are cooking for an old couple across the bayou, she asks him to read her a story before bed even though she’s too old for it. She falls asleep curled up next to him like a kitten as he reads “The Little Prince.” He starts calling her Minou.

As he leaves her room, shutting the door softly behind him, he finds his mother and Agnes waiting for him in their little living room. His mama has fury etched into her eyes and her forehead and Agnes is pale. The temperature goes from warm to freezing to stifling in a moment as he watches emotions flicker over their faces. 

“Get your bag, Merriell. Bring it out.” And he knows what they mean without even having to ask.

When he dumps the teeth onto the floor by the fire, Agnes recoils in a way that brings out a snake in him. She’s horrified by this? By teeth from faces she never even saw? He’s the one who’s so soul-sick he wrenched them out of a dozen gaping mouths. He’s seen death and agony and horror like she can’t imagine, and her judgement riles him. 

“There’s the funds for your wedding someday, girl. Ain’t you glad to see it?” He laughs the vicious laugh he perfected before Gloucester as she looks at him in horror. She clenches her jaw and her fists, and he can taste her anger in the air. He’s glad to see some fire in her because there’s nothing but acid in him. His mama fixes him with a hard look that he was afraid of once. 

“You’ll bury these tonight, Merriell Shelton. D’you hear me?” Shelton can feel his lip curl and he tuts in disdain. It’s not like they would have buried him if he’d died out there in stinking mud.

“You gonna put a gris gris on me if I don’t?” He laughs coldly, shaking his head “I won’t bury good money. That’s solid gold on those teeth.” He flinches when his mother slams her hand down on the table, causing the teeth to jump and rattle.

“Those are the remains of human beings,” his mother snaps. “And they may have been your enemies, but they had spirits just like everyone else and you’ve dragged them home with you. Now, you can’t return them to their families, but you will pay them respect in my bayou and you will do your best to send them home. Is that clear?” She stands up, angrily brushing dust and bone off of her skirt. “And you’ll pay your respects to your daddy, too.” 

When the moon’s as high in the sky as she gets, Shelton walks through the swamp on thin, rickety boards to the family graveyard with a heavy shovel in his hand. Even before he shipped out, it’d been a little while since he’d been. He went more often when he was small, but as he gets older he finds he has less and less to say to people he’s almost forgotten.

When he crosses the threshold, he feels a swell of rage unfurl in his chest and he tosses the shovel away from him. He’s a goddamn adult. Why does he still have to do every fucking thing his mama tells him to?

“Fuck this, I ain’t diggin’ no more holes.” He can still feel the blisters on his hands from digging foxholes, and it doesn’t feel like there’ll ever be enough time that he’ll want to dig a hole again. He pulls out a cigarette and lights it as he walks past a dozen raised graves maintained as though they were brand new etched with English and Hebrew. 

He picks up a pebble from the grass and holds it in the palm of his hand as he inspects it in the moonlight. It’s about the size of a half-dollar coin and heavy enough that he can feel the earth pulling it back down when he holds it still in his hand. It’s smooth enough to look almost polished and it’s a light gray with speckles of other rocks in it. He closes his fist around it and feels it slowly warm to the temperature of his body. 

When he reaches the stone marked “Albert Shelton”, he gently sets the pebble amongst the many other stones resting atop it. 

“Hey, daddy.” He sinks down against the grave, curling his hand into the long soft grass by his thigh. His heart pulses with sorrow as it always does when he comes to see his father. He knows he should say something. He could tell his dad about the war and what he’d done and seen. He could talk about how he never knew a human body held so much blood or how they smell when they’re rotting. He could talk about how much he misses him, how much he wishes things had been different. He could talk about brownish hair that shone copper in the right light, about a large nose and how he’d wake up with it pressed against his throat. He could talk about Eugene and the love he threw away. 

Instead, he takes a drag off of his cigarette and listens to the soft sounds of crickets and the far off purr of a gator. As he blows out the smoke, a warm breeze cards its loving fingers through his hair. He lifts his head to press into the feeling, and when he opens his eyes again the bag of teeth is laying in the middle of the path. He isn’t quite sure where he’d left it, but he doubts he dropped it there.

“Alright, alright. I get it,” he says sourly as he stands up. Snafu brushes the dirt and grass off the seat of his pants. He walks back to the entrance, looking over his shoulder as he goes but he sees nothing but rows of stones. He sighs as he picks up the shovel and walks to an unoccupied space, starting to dig into the rich, wet earth. He doesn’t have to dig very long or very hard. Teeth aren’t a body and they don’t need to be a proper six feet under, but he makes the hole about knee-deep and big enough that he could sit in it comfortably if his legs were crossed. It’s less work than a foxhole. 

When he takes the teeth and pours them into his palm, his stomach churns. The gold in them glints almost merrily in the moonlight while the blood turns into shadows. The wretched memory of the sins committed with his own two hands floods him, and he sinks to the ground next to the hole he’s just dug. He swallows hard against the bile rising in his throat. He places the teeth in the hole one by one, making sure each gets their own space. When they’re all resting inside their little grave, Shelton takes a deep, pained breath. He feels as though a giant snake has wrapped itself around his torso and is slowly, steadily squeezing. The air tastes like it did on Peleliu, all rank with bodies and waste and rotting. 

“I shouldn’t have taken any of you.” His voice is hoarse and almost silent, but he doesn’t need to be loud for the dead to hear him. “I was just filled with so much rage. I hated y’all so much that you weren’t even people anymore. I still hate you, and I’d do what I had to do again, but…” He shakes his head hard. “It don’t matter. I did what I did. I can’t go back and undo it. I hope y’all can find some peace now that you’re buried and you know I’m sorry.” 

Shelton stands and starts to fill the hole. The tightness in his chest is only worse.

He hasn’t prayed in a long time. How can he trust a god that made Gloucester, Okinawa, Peleliu? One that let what happened in Europe happen? (But how can he hate a god who made Eugene?) Shelton lets his mama pray over him, lets Agnes and Simone pray with her, but his own wire to god is wrecked. But as he buries the teeth of his dead enemies from a world away, words of mourning spill out of his lungs like air. 

“Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba...” Shelton paces his digging to the rhythm of the prayer, and by the time the prayer has been said, the hole has been filled.

“Oseh shalom bi-m’romav, hu y’aseh shalom aleinu v’al kol yisrael, v’imru amen.”

As soon as the final words are spoken, the tightness in his chest fades and a cool, swift breeze blows fresh-smelling air past his face and he can’t help but feel a bit lighter. Some of his ghosts are leaving him, and he wishes them a safe journey back to their people a world and a war away. Shelton knows he’s not fixed, not by a long shot, but he thinks he feels a little more forgiven. He supposes it’s a place to start. 

\------------------------------------------

After his visit to the graveyard, Shelton’s mama puts him to work around the house. There’s a lot of issues that cropped up during the war and the women in his family are pretty independent, but there’s things he’s just better at. The Bordelon women have magic in their bones; Shelton’s good with his hands. He fixes up the stairs leading up to the house so they can rely a little less on magic and a little more on gravity. He replaces what feels like a million slats of rotten wood on and around the house. He builds a big, fenced-in garden on a solid little plot of land a ways behind the house so his mama can grow herbs and tomatoes. 

His head is quiet when he works. When all he can hear is a hammer or a saw or a shovel, he can’t hear gunshots or mortars or dying men. He thinks his mama asked the bayou to look out for him because even when he takes short breaks, the critters are loud enough to keep his mind busy. 

But nothing can keep Shelton from thinking of Eugene. He buzzes with missing him all the time and gets no relief. He starts about a thousand letters, pouring his apologies out on the paper but the feelings are too raw to risk Gene not reading them. He wonders if Eugene still misses him. Is Eugene angry with him? He can see Eugene’s anger, righteous and all-consuming, and he knows he deserves every bit of it. But even worse is the thought that Eugene has moved past anger to indifference. Maybe he acknowledges that Shelton was right and is relieved to be rid of him. Those are the thoughts that hurt the most. 

In the evenings, after the exhaustion has seeped molasses heavy into his bones, he lets himself rest under the worried and watchful eye of his mama. She always knew that the war would break him, she saw it right from the start, but he can see she’s lost in the face of his wreckage. 

It takes time for Shelton to get used to the bayou again. While there may have been magic in the Pacific before, there certainly wasn’t while the war was on. Shelton got unused to the heavy scent of ozone in the air and the feeling of a million eyes (curious, interested, dangerous but never hostile) dogging his every step. It’s hard for him to see bones laid out throughout the house and not think of the rotting dead of Okinawa, Peleliu, Gloucester, Guadalcanal. He has to reteach himself to ignore the whispers on the wind and to stay calm whenever he catches the glimpse of an impossibly large form lurking just out of sight. 

It also takes time for Shelton to get used to his family. He’d gotten used to living a certain way overseas, and that way didn’t involve having a mother and two little sisters around every corner. He has to relearn modesty, courtesy, humanity. He has to learn how to not lose his patience every time one of them asks a stupid question or gets offended at the coarseness of his language. 

There are some things that are beyond his tolerance.

Miryam only asks about Eugene once. 

“You ever gonna tell me about him, bebe?” she asks one night as she cleans the dinner dishes. Shelton’s just come in from rebuilding the dock, and he freezes as he reaches for a beer in the fridge. His mama turns the water off and turns to look at him, resting her hips against the wooden kitchen counter. As his lead heart sinks to the soles of his feet, he knows she knows. Not that he’s queer - she’s known he’s liked boys and girls about the same for quite some time, since she read his infatuation with Peter Lareau like an open book when he was eight. But he could go the rest of his life and never bring what he had with Gene into the light.

He’s not ashamed. Shelton could never be ashamed of what he had with Eugene, with what started with an offered cigarette in an amtrac in the middle of the goddamn ocean. He feels incredibly, deeply ashamed of how he thought it could last. Those quiet nights in China almost had him believing that somehow he and Gene could make it work, that they weren’t worlds apart in every aspect of their life but war.

And he’s ashamed of how he left like a coward in the silent dark of night, leaving Eugene to wake up alone just that little bit closer to home. 

“Don’t know who you’re talking about,” Shelton grunts, popping the cap off of his beer as the two of them sweat in the heat of the kitchen. 

“Boy, you know better than to lie to me. I know what he was to you. You loved him.” Miryam watches him closely, interested in whatever face Shelton must be making. He can’t feel his face enough to know. 

“Love ain’t enough sometimes.” He turns away from his mother, holding the bottle so tightly in his hand he feels as though it should have shattered.

“I know you ain’t heard that from me, Merriell,” she scolds, crossing her arms. 

“He’s a rich, white, Christian, doctor’s son from Alabama.” Merriell can hear the blades in his words, feels them cut up his insides as they drag through his throat to come free. “What’s he gonna want with me? It was all fine over there, but it can’t happen here. We both knew it, but I was the only one to admit it.”

“Not bein’ rich, white, Christian, or a doctor’s son don’t make you unloveable, Merriell Shelton.” Miryam’s words are sharp, but not unkind. “Your daddy loved me for twenty years bein’ none of those things. He gave me three beautiful babies. We were happy. Lovin’ me wasn’t some kind of punishment for him.”

“It ain’t the same and you know it.” Shelton slams the bottle down onto the nearest surface - the old, pockmarked oak table that’s held his family’s dinners for generations. “Daddy was poor, black, didn’t have no family. Didn’t have a mama or daddy to be disappointed or ashamed. Didn’t have to hide his love for you away because it’s sick or wrong.”

“You ain’t wrong, Merriel. God made you just as you are, and God don’t make mistakes.” 

And Shelton believed that once, too. But now he throws his head back and laughs. “All God ever does is make mistakes and expect us to live with them. He makes us queer, makes us fight, makes us cruel and stupid and rotten inside. I wasn’t gonna be that mistake for Eugene, d’you hear me? Let him hate me. Let him spit on my name and curse me with every breath. But I wasn’t gonna let his lovin’ me fade into a mistake.” 

Shelton roughly pushes the bottle onto the floor, taking some kind of satisfaction in the fear that sparks in him at the noise even though he knew it was coming. “I’m leavin’.” Shelton grabs his boots and jams them onto his feet without tying them. He slams the door hard when he leaves and feels the whole porch jump. 

Shelton leaves the bayou that night for the first time since he’s been back. He takes a bus to New Orleans and finds himself a seedy dance club that’s more dark than light and a girl who smiles as sharp as him as he whispers in her ear with his hands around her soft, narrow waist. Her dress is soft and curls so sweetly in his hands as they sway together, much too close. By the time they’ve danced themselves out, they’re slick with sweat and Shelton almost, almost feels alive. But when she invites him back to hers, he finds himself shaking his head ruefully and leaving the club as alone as he’d entered it. He wants to want her. In a different life he’d have wanted her so bad he could have tasted it. But her edges are too soft, her hair too dark, and so he leaves her there.

He goes and gets filthy drunk. He goes to a dive bar only locals know and orders drink after drink until the barman sends him home. He crawls back to the apartment he’s still on the lease for, and he finds himself on the creaking, sagging floor of the living area. He stares up at the cracked, water-stained plaster ceiling until his mind is filled with patterns and rings and he can finally go to sleep. 

When he makes his way back home two days later in the same clothes he’d left in, he can feel his mama shake as she hugs him. 

She doesn’t ask again. 

And so Shelton’s life carries on. He finds work in the bayou and its neighboring towns doing building, painting, planting work, things he can do with his hands. He has fewer days where the war runs like a film behind his eyelids, he jumps less during thunderstorms and starts sleeping through the night. He speaks more French, more Yiddish, and learns to smile at his family again. 

He has melancholy days. He has days where all he can think about is the gaping wound in his middle that oozes and stabs that’s been there since the day he left Gene asleep on the train. He spends these days smoking cigarette after cigarette and wishing the earth would swallow him whole and erase his entire existence. These are the days where his mother and sisters follow him a little more closely, when he can hear them check to make sure his gun and knife are where he always stashes them and not hidden on his body. When he leaves the house, the bayou’s eyes follow him and that shadowy figure looms a little more closely. 

Shelton has started to make peace with his life. He’ll never be healed from the war or from Eugene, but he’s existing in a way that doesn’t make him want to stop existing any time soon. That has to be enough for now.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Iron and Wine's On Your Wings!
> 
> So I know the reunion doesn't happen here, but it's the same one as the last fic. I might write it at some point or continue this one on, I'm not sure. This one has just been clanging around in my googledocs for a while so here it is!


End file.
